Between a Cathouse and a Dog Track

Daytona Speedway celebrates five decades of American racing lore and legend.

The start of the 1952 race had been delayed an hour trying to get all the fans parked, and the length was cut during the event from 48 to 37 laps because of the incoming tide. Even then, some spectators returned to cars they had parked on the beach only to find them bumper deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

No one wanted to see the city lose its racing heritage or the income it generated. France proposed that a public-private partnership be formed to build the track. Daytona Beach officials decided to create a speedway authority and issue revenue bonds.

In December 1953, Lou Perini, owner of the Milwaukee Braves baseball team, announced that he was interested in financing the racetrack privately. France wined and dined him. The 1954 event was billed as the “Last Race on the Beach.”

In 1954, however, France’s luck ran out, as symbolized by his humiliating ejection from Gasoline Alley at Indy on May 13. He’d gone to Indianapolis to explore promoting a NASCAR race at the Indiana state fairgrounds and had borrowed a guest pit badge to get into the Brickyard. As the head of a rival sanctioning body, France was considered an outlaw by the AAA, which then sanctioned the Indy 500.

Did the insult strengthen his resolve to build Daytona International Speedway?

“Well, it didn’t hold us back any,” France told author Bill Neely in the late ’70s.In June 1954, Perini backed out of the project after his engineers convinced him the local roadways couldn’t handle the extra traffic. By then, the Florida legislature had created a local racing authority to facilitate the public financing of the speedway. After Perini’s withdrawal, the authority approved the sale of revenue bonds to raise the $1,675,000 that France then estimated it would take to build the speedway.

But problems arose on several fronts. There were issues with the federal aviation authorities, who were concerned that the speedway would interfere with airport operations. Local politics came into play. Racing politics came into play. And the expected price tag was growing.

When the now $2.9 million bond issue finally hit the market in the fall of 1956, “the timing wasn’t very good,” said France Jr. Other bond issues for new schools and highways had flooded the market. “So the [speedway] bonds were viewed as more risky, and the riskier the bonds are, to get someone to buy them means you have to run up the interest rate. It was going to be too expensive.”

Next, the authority considered general-obligation bonds, which are underwritten by taxpayers and must be approved by voters. Protests arose, and a referendum was postponed in the late summer of 1957. At that point, France Sr. decided to build the speedway himself on the cheap for $750,000, started a new corporation (that would later become International Speedway Corporation), reached an agreement with the authority in late ’57, and began clearing land on November 25.

To partly fund the project, France began selling 300,000 shares of stock at $1 each. Yunick said he bought 1000 shares for $1000 and gave several local speeches to help promote the project.

“This was before I found out us racers were charged 10 times as much for the same stock he sold to his friends,” Yunick wrote. “I saw a receipt for 200,000 shares for 10 cents a share to the local Pontiac dealer who did nothing but kiss France’s ass and make a fortune off Pontiac brass-hat cars.”

Yunick, who died in 2001, considered Big Bill to be greedy, ruthless, and dishonest and had no use for Bill Jr., either. Yunick wrote that he complained one time to Big Bill about something his son had done. “I said, ‘It will take him five years in the fifth grade to get an idiot’s license.’ Big Bill said, ‘I believe he can do it in four.’ ”

The speedway was built on a tract of municipal land next to the city airport, several miles west of the beach. In 1958, little else existed nearby. Outside the front stretch near the first turn was the Daytona Beach Kennel Club, a dog-racing track that opened in 1948. Not far outside the second turn was a boxy, two-story building that had thrived for several decades in the 20th century as a whorehouse known as Maggie and Jigg’s, after the newspaper comic strip Bringing Up Father.